Huawei Unveils New OceanStor Systems for HPC Clouds

Posted on November 22, 2013 By Pedro Hernandez

Huawei, a Chinese provider of IT and telecommunications systems and services, is looking to help high performance computing (HPC) organizations cloudify their workloads with its new storage systems.

The company's OceanStor storage line is now home to the new flagship 18000 series. The high performance systems help organizations bring the capacity-maximizing benefits of the cloud to their HPC environments, according to Huawei Enterprise USA's COO, Jane Li.

Li argued in company remarks that "HPC cluster silos are giving way to HPC clouds." IDC's data backs her up. In an email to InfoStor, a company representative cited IDC research revealing "that the proportion of sites exploiting cloud computing for part of their HPC workloads rose from 13.8 percent in 2011 to 23.5 percent in 2013."

The US launch of new, range-topping OceanStor 18000 enables HPC architects to deploy "a single enterprise storage system that can be tailored to support multiple HPC workloads," added Li.

Huawei's OceanStor 18500 and 18800 storage systems have Big Data covered with built-in support for Hadoop, the popular open source platform. The systems can be decked out with up to 16 controllers, 192 network ports and 3 TB of cache. In total, they can accommodate 3,216 drives, hard disks or solid-state drives (SSDs) and support up to 65,536 LUNs.

On the compute side of the coin, the company unveiled its new Tecal E9000 blade server, the building block of the company's converged infrastructure. Huawei boasted in a statement that its 15.6 Tb mid-plane bandwidth is "the highest blade server chassis bandwidth in the industry."

Tecal E9000 blade servers pack dual, 2-socket compute nodes in a half-width slot. The systems are powered by Intel Xeon E5 and E7 processors and fit large-capacity DIMMs that are 1.5 times the height of standard memory sticks. A range of storage node configurations (2.5-inch drives) and a variety of storage networking options (10GE/FCoE, FC, and QDR/FDR InfiniBand) round out the E9000.

"The Tecal E9000 was designed for application flexibility, as well as to support the next three generations of powerful processors, and the next decade of network technology that will dominate HPC clouds," said Li in a statement. The E9000 is the first blade server to support "100Gb cluster connectivity tomorrow," claimed the company.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.